Netcraft reported 2004 to be dynamic for the web hosting industry year with more than 10.9 million hostnames added.  The research showed that the five hosting providers that gained more than 100,000 active sites during 2004 are growing companies and familiar names.

The leader, according to the report, is the German giant 1&1 Internet. The company expanded into the American market gaining more popularity. The second one is The Planet, expanding in managed services atop dedicated servers. Extreme growth is reported by The Planet, showing 490% growth of active sites.

Go Daddy acknowledged a barometer of growth for a hosting business by the survey's results. Yahoo and EV1Servers round out with the companies above to be the first 5 companies in the industry.

The statistics of online shopping seem to show adequate growth for Internet services. According to VeriSign, holiday shopping statistics announced last week that the first week of the prime holiday shopping season accounted for $2.2 billion of online purchases.

"More consumers are shopping online and are now comfortable in purchasing content-related products in addition to traditional goods this holiday season," said Trevor Healy (Vice President, Payment Services, VeriSign). The domain registrar reports a 21% increase for the shopping week as compared to the same period in 2003.

The industry growth was additionally enhanced lowering prices for web hosting and domain registrations. Last week Aplus.Net (www.aplus.net) launched domain name registration with the .info extension for 99 cents each, with no quantity limit. The company encouraged web site owners to protect their online branding and intellectual property by registering the .info addresses that correspond with their existing domains.

Most of the hosting companies expanded their traditional services with the addition of more related services and site structures. News last week came from the web hosting provider C I Host (www.cihost.com) when the company unveiled its added search engine optimization services to improve customer rankings in Internet search engine results.

"Online shoppers use search engines to find the best e-commerce sites, and millions of sites are vying to attract business, so SEO is crucial for any e-business," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host.

In the storage market EMC Corporation extended its' worldwide storage software lead again in the third quarter of 2004 to 31.8% revenue share, according to a new report released last week by IDC.

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